Yesterday’s NEW YORK DAILY NEWS carried an article about the new state license plates, which will begin appearing after October 1…
After 14 years, the Goddess of Liberty Statue (Statue of Liberty for all you 20th-century types) will be going into retirement.
Above the numbering to the left will be a sketch of Niagara Falls…the silhouette of the Adirondack Mountains will be in the center…and the Manhattan skyline to the right.
Anyone else getting odd new license plates this year?
(PS: The legend “The Empire State” will be replaced by "The Umpire State, to honor our great sports teams the New York Mets, the New York Giants, and the Brooklyn Dodgers.)
PA got new ones. Yellow, white and blue, fading into each other on a kind of reflective plate. ‘You’ve got a friend… and/or keystone state’ was replaced with pennsylvania’s official website.
so you found a girl who thinks really deep thoughts. what’s so amazing about really deep thoughts? Tori Amos
Narile — not to nitpick, but isn’t that a fair description of the North Carolina license plate? The Wrights did their stuff at Kitty Hawk NC.
Am I missing a piece of history here? They were Carolinians AFAIK, they lived, worked, built the plane, and tested it there, unless I’m really forgetting my aviation history…
I don’t know whether they built the plane in their bicycle shop and schlepped it all the way out to the Outer Banks, or if they built it out there for some reason.
Ohio is the “Birthplace of Aviation”…the Wright brothers were born in Dayton.
North Carolina usually uses “First in Flight” as their motto, because that’s were the first significant flight took place…a sublte differance, but let’s them both have a claim to the fame.
The Wright Brothers lived, worked, and developed their machines and theories in Ohio.
They experimented in the Outer Banks, NC because it offered ideal conditions for flight experiments: high hills to glide from (they experimented with gliders before their powered flight) and soft sand to land on. And that’s why the first powered flight actually took place in North Carolina.
But Ohio could certainly be called the “birthplace” of the airplane.
As for the New York plates…after Oct. 1? Bummer…I just renewed my registration a few weeks ago. I like how the new ones sound.
“Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be
the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks.”
– Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective
Virginia has about 150 designs. Most are pretty cool, but one was really stupid.
It was some historical scene (Jamestown sailing ships, I think) done in black and maroon half-tones. Nice looking picture. But then the actual numbers were stamped and colored white. From just a few yards away, the numbers are indecipherable. Just what the cops need: a licence plate that is unreadable during a pursuit.
On the subject of license plates: I saw two “vanity” plates that seemed like obvious attempts at confusing those trying to read them. One used characters like B, 8, 9, 6, S, and G (upper and lower halfs made with round or semiround strokes); the other used X, W, K, M, Z, and L (straight vertical strokes). The former set used the sans serif font used about 12 years ago, the latter used the current seriffed font. I saw both cars parked, but I couldn’t read them without difficulty. I couldn’t imagine trying to read them while moving.
The Canadians. They walk among us. William Shatner. Michael J. Fox. Monty Hall. Mike Meyers. Alex Trebek. All of them Canadians. All of them here.
Florida also has one grillion plates, virtually all of which are horrible. The worst is one that says, “Invest in Children”…one understands the import, but it still sounds like children are a commodity to be traded.
The “Support the Arts” is (of course) the uglist by far…basically it’s designed to look like ripped tissue paper in three clashing colors.
I remember maybe 15, 20 years ago the state of Florida held a contest to design the new standard plate…the winning design was so butt-ugly, they ended up sticking with old one.
Iowa plates are just obnoxious…they’re white with a light blue “cityscape” of downtown Des Moines and a slightly darker blue farmscape on top of that. They used to just be blue with a white border and white numbers/letters…not exotic, but effective.
Texas also has a jillion different plates, with more designs being added every year. The designs currently available are at http://www.dot.state.tx.us/insdtdot/orgchart/vtr/reginfo/spplates/specplat.htm , but there are many many more that have been discontinued. On my truck, I have the State of the Arts plate. I question just how many “Pearl Harbor Survivor” plates are needed in Texas. And the dumbest designs have to be Read To Succeed and Animal Friendly. Yeesh.
Guess I’ll have to get one of those “And Justice For All” Young Lawyers’ Association plates next time renewal comes up, eh?
My old home state, New Mexico, has the ugliest damn plates in the Union after last year’s redesign. Pinkish, yellowish, reddish, orangey, sunsetlike colors, featuring a hot air balloon. View the worst plate on the continent at http://www.state.nm.us/tax/mvd/mvdlic.htm Ugh! The Balloon Fiesta is such a small part of the state of New Mexico, it doesn’t deserve to be on the plate.
I always like the motto “Live free or die” Can’t remember if it’s Vermont or New Hampshire. I wonder how the poor sonofabitch stamping the plate feels about the slogan.
When I was five or six I remember my mom’s car had plates with the “Grand Canyon State” motto but dad’s truck had “non-commercial” I thought it meant that the motto on the car’s plate was a commercial message to see Arizona and that for whatever reason this plate didn’t have it.
Goddammit Ike! What about the Yankees? You know damn well that the Yankees are the best baseball team in the history of the world, winning by far more championships than any other team in the game. The Dodgers and Giants long since flew the coop for the West Coast and the Mets have been playing second fiddle for years now. I for one am outraged that you deliberately omitted the Yankees from your post in some vague attempt to raise the ire of Yankee fans everywhere. Yankees rule!
